 Welcome, everyone, to this year's Dallas Agenda Week, a very special one, No Snow, and we're all here online. I'm Li Xing from Taixing Media, and our topic for today's Taixing debate is responding to COVID-19 crisis. As many of you have noticed, there will be two similar sessions, touch upon the experiences from the East Hemisphere and the West. Today is January 25th. I remember very vividly the year ago in Dallas, we were discussing the lockdown in Wuhan and how serious this new disease would be. I remember at a corner of the Congress hall in Dallas, I asked a Chinese scientist, how long this new virus would be around us? And he said, no one knows. It's going to be a year or several years. Where are we now today? After spending a year with a tragedy and a year on wildest imagination, nearly 90 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide with more than 1.8 million lives were lost. Crisis should not be wasted. What has happened? What can be learned? What are the most effective response and recovery efforts we have in various countries? And what recommendations on how business and governments can actually improve and increase their collaboration across the region? We have with us today distinguished speakers from the government, from business, and also from international organization. Let me introduce them to you now. Star was Minister Lananya Mahuda, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of New Zealand. And Mrs. Chopana Khamineni, Executive Vice Chairperson of Homo Hospital Enterprise based in India. And is Gong Yingying, Founder and Chairwoman of EDU Tech based in China. And last but not least, Peter Maurer, President of International Community of the Red Cross. And also welcome all of you who are here online, watching the live streaming or joining us in Zoom. We have about 45 minutes on the topic and I want to make sure we have at least 10 minutes for Q&A. So please send your questions about the Zoom Q&A function. And also if you want to tweet this session, please make sure you use the hashtag Davos agenda and IDF. Without further ado, let me turn to our panelists today. Let me start with Minister Mahuda. Zealand has slightly more than 2000 COVID cases and 25 deaths. The figures are telling. I don't need to re-emphasize what scale of the achievement that is. What lessons do you think the world at this stage should get from New Zealand? First of all, I would like to thank all of you for joining me today. Thank you very much. I would like to acknowledge your role as moderator, and to the other panelists. We're joining in this conversation, which is such an important time to regroup and gather our collective experience so that we can learn from each other. Let me first characterize the experience in a very Pacific way. We're all in the same storm. And the way in which we've chosen to respond and navigate our way through the storm has slightly differed. However, there are some key features that we can draw on to help us get through the other end because we're not there yet. Our Prime Minister, the right honourable Jacinda Ardern, said very early when the outbreak emerged and was evident here in New Zealand that the best economic response is a health response. So New Zealand undertook to go hard and go early in terms of taking quite severe and strong steps towards a lockdown because our approach was around an agile elimination strategy. We've also made it really clear that as a country, as a government, we wanted to ensure that we were taking a science-based informed approach in order to not only respond where we must, but also educate the public around a global pandemic and a number of factors that were still being understood as we were trying to respond along the way. Our elimination strategy had some key tools that we deployed and are continuing to deploy in our response. That is, it has three parts to test, to trace and to isolate. But you can well understand that we had to build capability along the way in each of those three key pillars of our response so that we had not only the right approach and methodology, but the people capability and continue to refine some of the technology to help us use these particular tools. While we have been looked to as a country with much success just recently, we've had one case of community transmission, which we really can't talk too much about until we get further information. But can I say we have remained ever vigilant about the task ahead of us in 2021 and continuing to learn from our approach in 2020. We're just coming through the other end of our summer break and it was really important for us as a government to ensure that our team of five million had the opportunity to experience a summer holiday because as we look around the world, there is a lot of fatigue around responding to COVID and how communities, families, governments are coping with the day-to-day task of addressing the pandemic. So a key element of enabling us to go into a successful summer break period with Christmas and the like was to ensure that we emphasised our test trace isolate approach and also emphasised through a public campaign how important it is for our team of five million to be a part of an ongoing effort to keep each other safe. This by and large has been a major part of our success and no doubt there may well be questions along the way. Another key element has been the government's task to lean into supporting economic recovery because of the impact of closing borders, the impact of not having international students, tourism being significantly impacted and what that did to our domestic economy. So we weren't prepared to sit by and let things just take a course that we couldn't have a greater input in and we introduced a 50 billion COVID recovery fund and made some significant investments primarily to support our local domestic economy and also to ensure as quickly as possible we could get our supply chains and goods to market as quickly as we can to be a part of our recovery. We're also politically ensuring that we are talking with our closest neighbours and across the Pacific around travel bubbles and quarantine-free travel. There is a commitment to Australia and also we've opened up our first quarantine-free travel arrangement with the Cook Islands and having further discussions with other around countries. Our focus right at the moment is on securing vaccinations and preparing for a vaccination rollout. We've given an undertaking to ensure equity of access to vaccine rollout across many of the Pacific countries and importantly, we are continuing to educate our own population about time frames and what to expect in terms of a vaccination rollout. If you were to ask me right now what would 2021 mean for New Zealand in terms of our COVID response? Primarily it means that we will continue to be vigilant around again isolating any outbreak within our communities, educating the public, continuing to rebuild and regenerate our workforce capability so that they are not fatigued in our own local response and educating the public about how we intend to approach a vaccination rollout. So I think in terms of opening remarks, we are learning as we go. We don't believe we have all the answers but we are taking very much again a science-based approach. We are continuing to refine and learn from experiences overseas and also from taking on expert advice. Thank you. Thank you Minister. So go early, go strong and stay vigilant and also educate the public. That allows New Zealand to protect life and also protect the livelihood by how the elimination strategy which works very well to working the new area where the countries will open up will bring that question to the Q&A session. But let me turn from the five million size of question to a 1.3 billion size of question. Shobana, Apollo Hospital is on the front line for the battle in Delano's massive challenge feeding the size of the population. What are the priorities now and looking forward to you and to India? Hi, Leeshan. And like you said, I was in Davos probably around the same time and last year doing a conference with Dr. Tedros and he was called away to discuss the pandemic and how it was evolving. And I would think that one thing that all of us have learned is the definition of time is not anything that it's been over our lifetime. It's somewhat like we've lived like 10 or more lifetimes over this last one year and starting into the pandemic. So how do at the end of it, I'd really want to talk about how we define success but we went in hard with testing, protect, treat and went through so many protocols. The best thing was that I think that the world started collaborating not just in the way that the vaccine has come out now but even earlier on in terms of protocols and medicines. So I think that that has really reduced the loss of life and people that have recovered from having COVID and I would think that that would go up in a big in strategy to say that collaboration not just the private sector and the government in every country, even ours, but also with the world that we had open access. This was a time when people shared much more freely. And the second thing is that apart from protocols is about logistics. This has really been a case not just in the early days of being able to get enough masks and PPEs and ventilators but I think even at a deeper level in terms of how to actually get the drugs to all the countries and move countries that did it better, that were able to and I would say India is fortunate that not only were we for a long time a manufacturing base of all these medicines. So we were able to put it out fast and also at an affordable price. So the actual damage for 1.3 billion if we had had to do it at the same pricing that the rest of the world did it, we would have been, I think that three generations, three to four generations from now would have been paying the price of this one year that we went through. So I would like to put out there that we did have some amount of infrastructure. The second thing is how we managed it. I think every state did it slightly different and engaged differently because we're a collective of states where slightly the health is a federal subject but having said that, you will see that if you measure that we might not be, we're way more populist than New Zealand but if you actually take the number of debts proportion wise it would measure up to the best in the world. And I think that comes from several factors that science will unveil but I think fundamentally it's also the ability to be able to contain it and to keep it and to put the strict social distancing, lockdowns, masking, all that I think will continue to be the way forward. Coming to the present about the vaccine, we do know that 56.7 million doses of the vaccine have been given in 52 countries. India is about the highest. We will have by the end of this the biggest vaccine program in the world. We started with an incredible stockpile because two of the world's cheapest vaccines are and effective now vaccines are being manufactured in India. So I think that supply is not going to be a problem for us. The big problem for us is going to be how can we actually get it out there? We have success in polio but I do think that this has a six month expiry the medicines, so the vaccine. So just getting it out there, this is going to become a bigger effort and this is the big challenge of what's going to take place before. I think that if even one vaccine expires it'll be such, I mean it's just wasting a life. So to me that's a big point. And I'd like to end at the end of definition of success. Definition of success is how much we can, we don't take this problem forward to the next generation, but also that we're able to do some of the things that we didn't do. Like NCDs, TB and so many of these people that have fallen into poverty. Now that we can breathe we're actually seeing the second order effects that COVID brought. It might not have killed so many, it might not have infected but it definitely destroyed many, many lives in different ways. And I think that today that's the second crisis that many countries especially ours are dealing with. It's a very important reminder and also we should bear in mind what's really the definition of success. Let me move on to another 1.4 given size of question and Indian. Indian is a young entrepreneur but a company which has launched its IPO a couple of weeks ago helps bring hospital, helps hospitals to bring their data online. And I think that's very critical at this moment. So what differences digitalization that AI can make in times like this given your experience in China? Indian. Thank you, Lisi. Also, good afternoon everybody and we're honored to be on this panel especially after this very eventful year. I remember early in January that I was in Davos and we were talking about the Wuhan and but later on I quickly flew back to China and my company has been heavily involved in working with multiple regional CDCs as well as China CDCs. And I think that and also we send a team into Wuhan during Wuhan lockdown. And so we had a lot of firsthand experiences in terms of the usage of medical AI and technology when we were facing a pandemic like this. And I think early on we were very lucky that we quickly identified the correlation between multiple factors for one purpose. That is to strike the balance between mortality rate and economic activity. So all of our technology capabilities and algorithms were made for that purpose to minimize the impacts of a pandemic control and our economy as well as trying to precisely manage the risky area and be precise in terms of the area that we need to, that needs to be tested and also plan early and have timely alert. So in conclusion, three highlights I want to share with everybody in terms of my view of the success in China. One is always the pandemic simulation, use technology to simulate and predict what's going to happen. You may not always be correct, but as the system learn, it gets more accurate. So you can plan early in terms of your medical supplies, in terms of policies that needs to be addressed. So we already see a lot of policies because we see a massive trend in the Chinese New Year traffic coming in and the system predicts and simulate the infection rates going up. Then the more optimal policy can be applied to the society. And second thing is early alert and more automated and precision response that you can highlight the risky area, like the public know early, if they've been the risky areas and also you can prioritize your testing capabilities to test the area with the highest risk and proactively test. So you find those infected patients early and to prevent high mortality rate and the further infection. And third thing is I think we still have a lot of work in terms of a disease research that I think the scientists and the needs to globally need to work together in terms of vaccination, drugs and treatments and stuff. And we already see a lot of progress during the past year but we have a long way to go in all those areas. So I guess this is the experience that we had for the past year. And I'm hoping that globally people can start working together all those key areas because we still see quite a turbulent 2021 in terms of vaccine supplies as well as drug discoveries and the certain areas of the disease control. Thank you. Thank you, Yingying. Thanks for sharing the Anagwan experience especially the private sector's contribution also the critical role the tech can play in this effort. So let's move on to Peter. You have a more global perspective how you would grade the global response to the pandemic while lessons we should learn and what alarming science you see now. Thanks a lot for having me on this panel. Maybe just to remind everybody it may be a global view but also a specific view because our core activities are basically focused on the most fragile context. War and violence struck in societies where war and violence fragility are also exacerbated by climate change, underdevelopment, poverty, governance issues and more. And that's the core activities where ICRC was active. I think I wanted to make five brief points and observations. First, in the context in which we are primarily operating the 30 most vulnerable and fragile contexts of the world some of what has been said by my previous speaker was right as well to do in those contexts. Fast and early reaction and preventive activities addressed to the most fragile populations. The internally displaced, the refugees, the detainees and having preventive material PPC and all distancing rules coming to those most fragile contexts and I think our fast reaction has been positive in mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in those contexts. In those contexts though, we have also seen that the secondary impact of the pandemic was more important than the primary. Less immediate health impact and more social economic impact from government decisions on lockdowns which has heavily affected the informal economic sector income possibilities of the poorest. So this was maybe my first point to highlight here that in many of the context of the most vulnerable context COVID has accelerated exacerbated fragilities but rather on the secondary impact than on the primary health impact. My second point I wanted to make that while this has been a global pandemic we have seen in many of the contexts in which we work very contextual impact COVID has been a global priority of the international community but when we look at real challenges it hasn't been the top priority in each and every context in which we work and therefore we had to be very contextual in seizing or in rightsizing the response to COVID because not in each and every context the pandemic has the same dynamic with communicable, non-communicable diseases with other fragilities which we are operating. My third point I wanted to make while this is a pandemic which has affected millions of individuals at the end of the day the big challenge is health systems stabilizing and strengthening health systems where health systems have been particularly fragile it has been particularly difficult to respond. Our recognition not only from COVID-19 but from many other pandemics in past decades in which we have been operating is that pandemics hit hardest when health systems as overall fail and therefore our first lessons learned is we have to fix those systems and not just respond short-term and temporarily. Fourth point I wanted to highlight is the importance of trust building in policy measures against pandemics. I think we have been best and we have been most effective and efficient where we have been closest to communities, to local communities, to consensus building in local communities, to trust building and we can't sort of top down respond to the pandemic if there is no engagement, trust and buy-in for the measures you take by the communities with which you operate. And finally, and fifthly, I think this has highlighted once again that the pandemics are such big issues that we cannot continue to work in the same way we have been working before. We need new arrangements between organizations, value chains for impacting the response on pandemic which changes fundamentally the way we work, the way we respond, the way we organize ourselves, the way we are mandated to do things, the way we finance our response. So it leads to quite a fundamental way on first-time frontline responders in health and humanitarian crises in which we work. I'll stop it here. Thank you, Peter. Very comprehensive, I draw a lot of notes ranging from contextual impact to the importance of trust building and new arrangements. We'll come back to many of the points later but I'll give a reminder to our guests online that now time is for you to submit your questions. I have a few but I also get a question from the floor as well from, forgive me if I pronounce your name wrong, Mr. Inan Wu Rahman, CEO of Dalgut Hercules Corporation. His question is, what policy interventions can help overcome the mental fatigue been seen due to the pandemic? We've been with this for a year and how to overcome the fatigue and make sure our policies are still, people still respond to the policies. Who would take that? Probably I'll invite our minister Mahuta first. There are a few aspects we had to consider along the way and while not directly focused on the fatigue element, I think in terms of societal fatigue and stress and anxiety around the economic impacts, our COVID economic response was designed primarily to allay some of the intermediary challenges of businesses thinking, how would they make it through a lockdown and out the other end? So we were very mindful that we had to create some buffering support to cushion the economic impact on our business sector. We were mindful and that materialized and wage subsidies, more business loans, things like that. We were also mindful that we needed to ensure fairly quickly and this comes to the point that was made earlier by one of the speakers around supply chain, especially when we were sourcing PPE gear that we had a two way opportunity to guarantee PPE gear being sent to New Zealand, but also similarly being able to get food to receiving markets. And Singapore was one of the earlier supply chains that opened up to us. And then if I think about workforce fatigue, especially within the health sector, it was to ensure that we had enough agility within our system. And this goes to what Mr. Murray was talking about in relation to agility and new ways of working that we enabled our community health workforce to work very aligned with our tertiary health workforce to relieve some of the pressure around things like testing. So many of those things we learned along the way and responded very quickly, designed the policies and where necessary legislation. Now one of the key legislative areas where we had to respond quickly was in the scenario where we went from a nationwide lockdown to regional lockdowns and then needed some empowering mechanisms for our key workers to be able to enforce what a regional lockdown would mean, closing regional borders, enabling our first responders to have certain powers that they wouldn't normally have in a usual situation for a health response. So those were some of the things that we learned along the way and we designed policies and legislation when necessary to empower and enable our local response. Thank you. Thank you, Minister Mahuda. The second question is from Mr. Facil Ali Brahim, the Vice Minister at the Ministry of Economy and Planning of Saudi Arabia about vaccine. What does a successful vaccine rollout look like and what are some of the key obstacles or concerns with a successful vaccine rollout? Any thoughts on how to overcome them? And I'll add also one question to that is when do you think the vaccine will bring back the normal life back to us? A new normal, of course. Shabana, please. So we did a mapping in Apollo and actually it started with supply chain because again we had that backing and we looked at what the vaccine is. So one is that the challenge in many countries is to be able to do the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines which require very sophisticated supply chains. So I think it's important to understand that you need a vaccine, a successful vaccine is A, something that, you know, of course you can't do it at room temperature but which can take the supply chains normally available which is between two to eight degrees. And I think that there's quite a bit of capacity in a country like India that did polio and we realized that we already had 80% capacity for such a supply chain to be able to vaccinate almost, we were looking, India is looking at vaccinating almost 500 million people in the first law. Having said that, 80% available in the two to 8%. Next is if you can get a vaccine that most vaccines today that are available need two doses. So you have to plan the logistics, not just of giving the first dose but having enough and reminding the people to come back. Otherwise it's not completely effective but Johnson and Johnson is coming out with a single dose. So I think that would be successful. The third is you look at pricing and you say what can countries afford? So countries like India, we can afford our current vaccine that is, you know, fortunately, I must say that the Covax Alliance. So how do equitable access? So Gavi, Sepi and all the others come WHO coming together to be able to make sure that vaccine is equitable access and affordable. So today our vaccine, I think is being sold. The one in India is being sold at $2.00. And I think that compared to a modern at 30 and then plus for a Pfizer. So I think these to me are the fundamentals and then getting it out there and making sure, so we have a country of huge, we have a country of huge geography. And I think that to be able to get it out there and the cold chain that public and private and who are the vaccinators. So the actual math that has been done by the government and hopefully now the private will get involved. It's just mammoth to be able to open it up. So I think that just whatever the safe points are. So we have to make sure that this vaccine is given safe and given at large scale. So 500 million for us is a big target. We need to be able to do it in the next year to bring this country back to normal. So I think that the way that the US is doing it and all that, the last thing I'd like to add is who should get it first? So in India, it's the healthcare workers. It's the frontline workers of the sanitation, the police, the army. And then the people over 50, especially the ones with comorbidities. So I think that when one of the speakers spoke about giving it to the most vulnerable, those are the categories. So I think that should be the prioritization. Thank you. Peter, do you have anything to add? Yeah, I just wanted to really emphasize what has been said by Shobana, but maybe add that in addition to equitable and affordable. I think one of the big challenges for us is really to access non-government controlled areas. I just remind you that between 60 and 70 million people in the world live in areas not reached by any ministry of health and government authorities. So for us, success also looks in achieving to reach those areas because pandemics don't know or can't know ungoverned spaces and unreached spaces because we would have them flip over again into other areas. And the second is really that it doesn't and a successful vaccination campaign is not at the cost of other vaccines. We see already at the present moment that between 60 and 70 countries have reduced other forms of vaccinating populations because of the focus on COVID and have reduced other forms of vaccines. So success also is success which does not come at the cost of other communicable and non-communicable diseases, health support and other vaccination campaigns. That's a very important reminder that for this particular disease, that success has to be success for all and it shouldn't come at a cost of other. We should in some places, many people like today were saying that let private sector participate more. So sometimes too much government also is not the right solution. I think that should be a cue. I want to hear from Yiying as well. A question for you that as a private sector you collaborate with the government early on at the local level, what tips you can give for the strong government and private collaboration in crisis like this and to make sure some of their efforts are long lasting? I think I would say a balanced approach would be the best answer because luckily in China, we have a very strong government led. So even for us as a private company, we're still working under the whole architecture design of China CDC and their regional CDC. So that gave us a lot of advantage in terms of plan ahead and based on the simulation that we did with our technology. And that's very, very important that when the vaccination comes out because obviously the production volume is gonna gradually roll up to the desired volume and the effective time ranges between six months to more than a year as people still need to come back and take the second shots and the third shots. So effective planning is very, very important when you have a limited medical supplies and limited vaccination and also a planned approach is also important when you are expecting a massive amount of traveling within the countries. And in terms of, I think I would wanna highlight response fast early is extremely important and during our experiences, we's without the vaccine and it's just a lower the mortality rate and precisely means that you don't have a massive lockdown and you lock up the specific areas. So we minimize the impacts in the society. And from our model, we don't see miraculously the society just goes back to normal because there's a vaccine, right? It also limits the rollouts of people taking the vaccine together with international travel policies as well as the research we're doing for this particular disease. And it's not just about China and it's not just about Asia. And I think globally, people will realize that we need a planned kind of working together approach to come this pandemic to go back to the normal that we're used to. Otherwise it will be, you know, a club of people with vaccination and very low mortality rates and there'll be areas without treatments, vaccination or what Peter mentioned, the government reach and that would have a very, I would expect disastrous impacts in terms of economy, global policy, you know, in terms of countries helping each other. Thank you. Thank you, Yingying. Another question also coming from a comment we've heard a lot last year. It was worth the international collaboration when we need it most. The international collaboration of the early coronavirus control was developable at best. So now we're moving on to the vaccine. Question is, what will be an appropriate coordinated response cross-government to tackle vaccine misinformation? And this question comes from, forgive me if I pronounce your name wrong, Mr. Tengku Mohamad Tafik Tengku Aziz, the president and group CEO of Petronas, Malaysia. So who would like to tackle, who would like to take the vaccine and this information question? Maybe I'll turn to Minister Mahuta again. In terms of the approach we're taking because we have to build confidence in New Zealand that in securing vaccinations that we have a robust domestic assurance process through which we will pass the vaccination through and then roll out. So we have a MedSafe standard, our own standard that in part is well understood by our population and would I think help in the effort to roll out the vaccination to our communities and then across the Pacific. So we are going through the process at this moment of explaining how that MedSafe process will align to the vaccines that we're securing as well as securing information from the clinical trials and the roll out experiences of donor countries in this area. If I was to be absolutely frank in terms of the scale of our, let me say the nature of the challenge that we have here in New Zealand is to try and ensure that the body of the vaccine knowledge around vaccinations for COVID is not overshadowed by views within our community around vaccinations per se. So we're grappling with that. There are communities within our population who are anti-vaccine of any kind. So again, our effort is around building good information, assurance of our own domestic process MedSafe as we roll out the vaccinations and looking towards the experiences of other countries. We're running short of time but I saw the hands from Shobana is up. So if you want to give a very quick comment. Oh, real quick comment is three stages of vaccine that once you get people out there who want the vaccine and we're seeing that's declining day by day as more information is out. The three, one is that, you know, we have vaccine shortage at this point. There's less than the world really wants. The second is when it becomes equitable but then what we're looking at six months from now they're going to be almost a hundred vaccines out. So there's going to be a glut. So the world has to even think about such a situation and not just that this vaccine is there for this year and for COVID, COVID is here to stay and you're going to need this vaccine year after year after year. So it will become almost like a flu shot. So I think that this is going to become something that is there for the world. Thank you so much. And with that very encouraging note I think we have to wrap up this very informative and inspiring session. And I want to quote Shobana and says in the last year we actually feel we lived many lives in one year and I hope we're all emerged out of this wiser and smarter in how we do our post-COVID world. Thank you so much for sharing with us your wonderful insights today. And I hope I can meet you all next year in the snow, Davos again.